For instance Lincoln at last felt bound to work out for himself definite prospects for a forward movement; it is sufficient to say of this layman’s effort that he proposed substantially the line of advance which Johnston a little later began to dread most; Lincoln’s plan was submitted for McClellan’s consideration; McClellan rejected it, and his reasons were based on his assertion that he would have to meet nearly equal numbers.  He, in fact, out-numbered the enemy by more than three to one.  If we find the President later setting aside the general’s judgment on grounds that are not fully explained, we must recall McClellan’s vast and persistent miscalculations of an enemy resident in his neighbourhood.  And the distrust which he thus created was aggravated by another propensity of his vague mind.  His illusory fear was the companion of an extravagant hope; the Confederate army was invincible when all the world expected him to attack it then and there, but the blow which he would deal it in his own place and his own time was to have decisive results, which were indeed impossible; the enemy was to “pass beneath the Caudine Forks.”  The demands which he made on the Administration for men and supplies seemed to have no finality about them; his tone in regard to them seemed to degenerate into a chronic grumble.  The War Department certainly did not intend to stint him in any way; but he was an unsatisfactory man to deal with in these matters.  There was a great mystery as to what became of the men sent to him.  In the idyllic phrase, which Lincoln once used of him or of some other general, sending troops to him was “like shifting fleas across a barn floor with a shovel—­not half of them ever get there.”  But his fault was graver than this; utterly ignoring the needs of the West, he tried, as General-in-Chief, to divert to his own army the recruits and the stores required for the other armies.

The difficulty with him went yet further; McClellan himself deliberately set to work to destroy personal harmony between himself and his Government.  It counts for little that in private he soon set down all the civil authorities as the “greatest set of incapables,” and so forth, but it counts for more that he was personally insolent to the President.  Lincoln had been in the habit, mistaken in this case but natural in a chief who desires to be friendly, of calling at McClellan’s house rather than summoning him to his own.  McClellan acquired a habit of avoiding him, he treated his enquiries as idle curiosity, and he probably thought, not without a grain of reason, that Lincoln’s way of discussing matters with many people led him into indiscretion.  So one evening when Lincoln and Seward were waiting at the general’s house for his return, McClellan came in and went upstairs; a message was sent that the President would be glad to see him; he said he was tired and would rather be excused that night.  Lincoln damped down his friends’ indignation